Eight Day Week

Potential Pratt-fall? So, magazine editors are feeling pret-ty smug now that all those irritating dot-commoners with their smart little glasses have been forced to shove their candy-colored laptops into their Manhattan Portage bags and flee their “open-plan” Tribeca workspaces . Today, the smugness congeals at the National Magazine Awards ceremony or “Ellies,” the industry’s Oscars with its appallingly early cocktail hour, very rubbery chicken, treacherous opportunity for semi-glam midday fashion, and “elephant”-shaped Calder mobile award statue that looks like a big, angry boomerang. Booi-ii-ing! This year’s big questions: How does smarty-pants Harper’s Magazine feel about going up against Nylon, the magazine spearheaded by supermodel Helena Christensen, in the 100,000-400,000 circulation category? Will Gourmet sex goddess Ruth Reichl (read her memoir, Comfort Me With Apples, for naughty details) maul Jane magazine’s Jane Pratt in the 400,000-1,000,000 circ category? How will GQ’s Art Cooper (two nominations) handle the potential steamroller by his former protégé, Esquire’s David Granger (eight nominations of course, one was for an article about male breast cancer) . They’re gonna have to send the entire remaining staff of Inside Content all three of them to puzzle it out!

Lillet or Beller? Do you feel more like sucking down a tall French aperitif or getting sucked in by a tall, loping author who likes to be seen zipping around town with his kooky actress girlfriend? How about both? Tonight, Lillet which is trying to change its rep as the beverage of choice for gay male publicists and middle-aged ladies conducts a gastronomic tour of Chelsea’s art galleries benefiting the Community Research Initiative on AIDS. The drill: Lillet hired chefs to “interpret” various artworks, and then the “interpretations” will be served while the artwork is exhibited (i.e., view Damian Loeb’s paintings at the Mary Boone Gallery while eating Nobu Matsuhisa’s “interpretation” of Damian Loeb some “Plum Sykes sushi,” perhaps?) Meanwhile, people around town such as Condé Nast whatever-he-is James Truman and The New Yorker’s hard- partying literary editor Bill Buford will be hosting dinners not necessarily cooking, though we hear Mr. Truman makes a great squab honoring writers from the Yaddo artists-and-wine-tasting colony, such as Rick Moody, A.M. Homes, Amy Tan, Jonathan Lethem and, um, Carl Bernstein. The fun concludes with an after-hours party co-chaired by nightlife-lovin’ author Thomas Beller. Cutie-pie committee members include Mr. Beller’s girlfriend, actress Parker Posey; novelist Bliss Broyard; and The New York Times’ Alex Kuczynski.

You can only coast on being Michelle Pfeiffer’s ex-boyfriend for so long, and then you just gotta bust out or you’ll scream. Tonight, Fisher Stevens’ new movie Just a Kiss, with Marisa Tomei, Kyra Sedgwick and some wacky animation, opens the Gen Art Film Festival. Mr. Stevens, who looks a bit like a poodle, was wearing Dolce & Gabbana slipper loafers, T-shirt and blue jeans and driving in a rented convertible or so he said when he spoke to special Eight-Day Week correspondent George Gurley, who asked: “Ever get embarrassed?” “Embarrassment is humbling,” Mr. Stevens confided, “and to be humbled, I think, is a very important thing, and it’s good to be humbled. Just the other day, this woman came up to me on the street and she goes, ‘Yo, Fisher Stevens, you were fierce in the 80’s! Where you been?!!!’ That was pretty humbling.” Not as humbling as being dropped like a rock for that big lug, David Kelley, the new Mr. Michelle Pfeiffer.

Boutique bongo! Benefits these days are so strenuous no one can ever just throw a party anymore, everything has to have a concept, a sponsor, an athletic component . Today, the Madison Avenue Business Improvement District mounts its version of the Lillet thingy yesterday for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Saddle up your pony: One invitation gets you into a 29-block party with receptions at 67 boutiques and 40 galleries. (Two words: alcohol poisoning.) In the crowd, somewhere: starlet China Chow; TV personality Jane Pauley; her husband, cartoonist Garry Trudeau; dancer Ann Reinking .

A man, a plan a piano! As with benefits, it’s not enough to give a simple concert these days, so pianist Anthony de Mare (see startling beefcake photo) is staging an 80-minute “theatrical journey” of one man and his piano called Playing With MySelf note cagey capitalization. We called his Upper West Side apartment. “I’ve lived here, oh dear, basically since the 80’s. It offers everything,” said Mr. de Mare. Well, not everything: “My boyfriend lives in Chelsea, so I spend a lot of time down there, but sometimes Chelsea can be a bit much. We met at a fund-raising benefit for the Gay Olympics in Amsterdam ’98 he was on the wrestling team, and from then on it just sort of evolved.”

[HERE Arts Center, 145 Sixth Avenue, 8:30 p.m., 647-0202.]

Friday 4th

More proof that the new way to get over your mean boyfriend is to get out a $5,000 sewing machine and whip up a frock (Shoshanna Lonstein) or a handbag (Monica Lewinsky): The Home Sewing Association stages a Designer for a Day event at the Bridgewater Commons Mall! Sew your own cell-phone carrier! H.S.A. executive vice president Joan Campbell, who herself just bought fabric for a nifty bomber-jacket-type top, says sewing has increased in popularity, and she has an explanation! “We did a clinical study,” she said. “When people are sewing, their actual blood pressure goes down, their skin temperature cools, their heart rate slows, they relax.” Thanks, but we’ll stick to high-blood-pressure, broiling-skin-temperature Loehmann’s!

Remain under pillows! Do not emerge! If you have big plans for a lovely tiptoe through the tulips, be warned: Today is New York Cares’ “Spring Clean-Up Day,” so you’ll likely be handed a big Hefty bag and rake by some bustling organizational type . Hey, a little do-goodism might not be so bad, and you could use the exercise, Mr. Chubbo!

[Call 598-5800 for your pre-assigned project site.]

Sunday 6th

Entire weekend in bed? Could be. Unless you have a dog, in which case drag yourself to that big, hairy, drooling singles scene known as the “DogsWalk Against Cancer” 12,000 New Yorkers and New York pooches stride for miles and enter “waggiest tail” contests. Watch for Blind Date producers hiding behind the bushes .

Awfully Fonda you? The American Cancer Society honors Regis Philbin, the man responsible for putting scores of men who are not in the Mob in a monochromatic shirt-tie ensemble. Your entertainment: thinking-woman’s sex symbol Charles Grodin! Also there: wayward hairdresser Frédéric Fekkai, Art Garfunkel, John McEnroe and Miramax prankster Harvey Weinstein. Now that’s a committee and a half. Meanwhile, well-preserved comeback queen Jane Fonda gets a tribute at Lincoln Center with Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Gregory Peck. And not to be outdone, writers Erica Jong, Mitch Albom, Mary Karr, James McBride and Frank McCourt pop up at the Society for Ethical Culture for an Authors’ Guild panel titled “What Do I Do for an Encore? Second Acts in American Literary Life.” Bring Dave Eggers.

This just in! Two stubbly men who like their dessert Knopf poobah Sonny Mehta and aforementioned GQ editor Art Cooper host a special screening in Tribeca of The Feast of Death, a documentary about decidedly uncheery author James Ellroy, and Mr. Ellroy will be there with his new book, The Cold Six Thousand. Ask Mr. Mehta for the first dance.

Pop a DeWoody! It may be an “eh” week for Art Cooper, but it’s a good week for the arts . Put on your ball gowns for an Alliance for the Arts benefit co-chaired by Beth Rudin DeWoody (honorary chairman is the last dignified human left in New York, Brooke Astor) and patronized by the new, “low-key” Karenna Gore Schiff (who is clearly very pissed off that Dad blew her big chance at inviting all her swell pals to go bowling in the White House, but who needs to just relax and maybe tell Pops to lay off the Chunky Monkey before he starts to look even more like Rosie O’Donnell) and former Clintonista Dee Dee Myers . If you’re more interested in wood than DeWoody, John Marchese will be reading from his book, Renovations: A Father and Son Rebuild a House and Rediscover Each Other yep, another trumpet call from the so-called simplicity movement that has sent a bazillion young people barreling into Restoration Hardware to stock up on fancy home-repair items. Bonus, too-close-to-home excerpt: ” my girlfriend seemed to regard my rural fantasies with increasing boredom, finally ignoring them altogether . It seemed that her fondest dream was to be picked by her boss to lunch conspicuously at the Four Seasons. And there I was, talking all the time about running away to the woods.” (Needless to say, that relationship didn’t last.) One question, though: If he’s so proudly fond of bugs and twigs, why is he scuttling back here for a ritzy book party in Tribeca tonight?

Tina Brown meets Bensonhurst! How gritty. The embattled Talk editor throws open her arms to former Daily News hot copy boy A.J. Benza and his new memoir, Fame! Ain’t It a Bitch: Confessions of a Reformed Gossip Columnist. Mr. Benza went to L.A. to become a movie star, but ended up as the E! Channel’s own Carson Daly. Talk–Miramax Books has invited some fellow tough guys, such as Harvey Weinstein, Howard Stern and the Sopranos gang, who are in danger of Gwyneth-like overexposure gird yourself for three months of photos of Sopranos cast members in the Hamptons.